Big Google is much worse than Big Oil

And ninethlyChess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency - Raymond Chandler

Keep your friends close and your herpes closer. That's a maxim I've always lived by. I've found it to be rewarding, and suggest you adopt it as well.

Plenty of groups often forget who their friends, enemies or herpes are. Take Congress, for example, which this week skewered oil executives for making "too much" money. Anyone who has scanned the political donor lists knows that just about every politician worth his salt receives handouts from an energy concern. Still, the politicos had the audacity to sit there with big, red payola lesions running across their foreheads and stick it to some of America's finest executives.

That's making enemies out of your friends who gave you herpes and doing it in a public forum. Strictly forbidden under Otto's Razor.

What kind of lesson does this teach our children? You're supposed to grow up, make as much money as you can and live a decent life. Nothing's more decent than giving us the fuel needed to do the things we do. Try not doing the things you do and see how you like it.

If making money is so wrong, then why, for example, hasn't the government put Google under its probing light of justice?

In case you haven't noticed, Google makes a ton of money for doing almost nothing. It supplies boring, text ads to web pages. Its success hinges on its stature as the most popular search engine, which derives from its position as the best search engine, and that's not even true anymore. Google was certainly the best search engine for awhile, but they're all about the same these days. In fact, Google's search engine often turns up more garbage than the rest because of its obsession with blogs.

As companies shell out more and more to up their AdWord positions, you can expect to pay more and more for goods. All types of goods. Only the rich will survive.

Google covers up its relative lack of innovation with a bunch of touchy-feely tripe. It really slathers on the tripe. Big time. Just huge mounds of tripe. Like more tripe than you've ever seen. Trust me, I know tripe. Love the stuff.

Silicon Valley embraces the mystique surrounding Google's data center. Google can build its own servers and manage huge farms of them. It's awesome. When not doing that, it creates foundations to take care of people, serves free gourmet lunches and lets workers roll around on colored balls.

Most of you people scamper about trying to gobble up as much of this tripe as possible. If there was a line for Google herpes, you'd pull down your pants and rub all up against the STDoogle. "Mmmmm, Google Herpes," you might say.

Another part of the problem here is that Google pitches this whole open source love thing. You all buy into that, of course, because Google told you to. Google supports open source projects. It pays people to love Firefox and does something or other with OpenOffice.

In case you haven't noticed, every one of Google's supposed open source efforts is designed to unseat Microsoft in one area or another. You probably have noticed because every reporter on the planet feels the need to describe Google as the next Microsoft. And you all love this idea.

Won't it be something when your friend turns to an enemy and saddles you with lifelong herpes? Huh, won't it?

Why exactly are you pushing Google to Microsoft's status? Yes, you!

Apparently, a domination fetish runs deep within geek culture. You want to be dominated but still gripe about it. Well, I'll dominate you all for $1 per click with a plunger and tub of lard, and I'll even do it in the Creative Commons.

Go ahead and celebrate everything Google. When it has a total monopoly on online advertising, content, goods and services, religion, morality and porn, you can really rejoice. After all, we all love advertisements so much. I spend hours marveling at Google's ad farm.

To help push Congress to question why Google is getting so rich with its ad gouging, I'll be conducting a publicity stunt later this week. I'm taking my SkyCar - seen here - and flying over to the Googleplex. Well, I'm not actually flying. I'm driving the crane that holds my SkyCar to the Googleplex and then dropping the SkyCar repeatedly into the parking lot.

After that, I'm going to chase Segway-riding Googlers around the Googleplex striking them with my SkyCar. No damn speedo-wearing Rusky is taking over my country. As Googlers splatter against the Exec's windows with a cascade of Segway parts darkening the sky, the company will know that I have left my mark. Google can have Otto's Herpes.

Then, I'll drive off and go fill up the gas tank of my crane-mobile with as much fuel as possible. ®

Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for thirty years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, nursing an opal-plated prostate, wearing a smashing suit, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest.